‘Freda’s through there in the kitchen. Go and say hello.’
On shaky legs I walked into the front room and put down my bag. I walked through the room feeling as if I was on my way to the gallows, such was my trepidation at meeting Freda again. She had managed to create a respectable family room, complete with Singer sewing machine and piano, but I knew that she would be just the same vicious snake as she always had been. I walked through to the back kitchen where I could hear her at work.
Freda was washing dishes at a square, brown pot-like sink and she turned when she heard my footsteps on the flagstone floor.
‘So, you’re here. Grown a bit, I see,’ she eyed me critically. ‘You’d better go up and put your bag in your room.’
Upstairs there were two more rooms. Freda led me to the one on the left, containing a single bed with an eiderdown, which was a change from my old sofa and blanket at Patricroft. There wasn’t a light in the room, just a table, on which had been put a meccano set.
‘You are never, ever to touch that,’ Freda told me in a harsh, emotionless voice. The toy, I knew, was the one memento she had of the son she’d deserted.
‘And don’t think for a moment that I want you here. You’re a lying, thieving little sneak and always will be.’
The next morning, Freda showed me what my duties were. She took a cold and savage pleasure in pointing out every little thing that needed to be done, jabbing her bony finger at a hospital corner on her bed-clothes, or a crevice in the iron range that needed to be cleaned just so. She had her other hand on her hip and spoke to me as if I was an idiot.
So began my new life as a seven-year-old slave in the town of Hulme.
The next morning, as soon as it was light, I got up, dressed and went downstairs. Freda and my father were still in bed and the house was chill in the grey light of early morning.
First, as instructed by Freda, I emptied the ash dust out of the grate in the kitchen fireplace, then cleaned the fire back and put aside the partially burned pieces of wood to use later. Next, I let myself out of the back door, loaded two buckets with coal from a heap in the yard, and chopped the large logs of wood into smaller pieces with an axe.
I struggled to remember what Freda had told me and kept getting it wrong or would forget something. She’d instructed me how to lay the fire and I knew she wanted the coal positioned in a certain pattern, but I couldn’t remember if the smaller pieces should be put on first or the bigger. I felt hot and panicky. If it wasn’t just so, I knew that Freda would hit me.
After laying the fire, I scrubbed the hearth, then cleaned the ashes off the mantelpiece. By now, I was exhausted but I still had to lay the kitchen table for breakfast and fill a kettle with water so I could wash up last night’s pots and pans.
A week later, black and blue from Freda’s beatings, I started at Duke Street School; and then things became even tougher for me, as all my chores had to be done before I left.
Freda had a part-time cleaning job in the flat behind the local newsagents. She wasn’t home when I got back from my first day at school. She’d given me a key to let myself in with which I wore around my neck on a string. I soon realized that she didn’t like to be there when I was doing all the afternoon chores; so if she wasn’t working, she’d be down at Lewis’s or Pauldines, Manchester’s big department stores, shopping with her friend Madge or having tea round at her house.
I let myself into the house and quickly got to work. I started by sweeping the floor, then washed the lino in the front room with a scrubbing brush and a cloth. Next I went upstairs. I was dreading going into Freda and Dad’s room as I felt at any moment that one of them might walk in. I quickly made the bed then hung up any clothes strewn about the room. Lastly, the worst job of all.
I bent down and slid the chamber pot out from under the bed. It was full of urine and, to my disgust, there was excrement there too, the smell of which made me gag. I carried the heavy pot across the room and down the stairs. A couple of times, on the way to the outdoor toilet, urine slopped over the sides so that, after scrubbing and drying the pot, I had to get a cloth and bucket and wash the stairs too.
My next job was scrubbing the kitchen floor. If Freda so much as noticed one little pool of water left between the uneven flags I’d get a beating. Everything had to be perfect. She’d slapped me across the face the previous week when I’d failed to do up the buttons on her blouse before hanging it up. I didn’t even know that was how it was meant to be done, but I knew excuses would be pointless.
Freda also delighted in inspecting every nook and cranny in the range, knowing that it was the hardest job to do well. If she’d been cooking something that had boiled over, like a rice pudding, I had to use wire wool to clean the brown, crispy gunge from the oven and it made my fingers bleed. Once a week, I had to black-lead the range – the previous day it had taken me an hour and a half.
I’d just finished my chores by the time Freda got home. The moment I heard her open the front door and put down her bags, my heart began to pound. I stood hiding behind my bedroom door, hardly daring to breathe and listening with every nerve-end to the sounds she made as she moved around the front room and kitchen inspecting my work.
Then came Freda’s steps on the stairs. I heard her walking round her bedroom checking everything. Then she came back out onto the landing outside my door.
Please go downstairs. Please let everything be perfect!
Freda opened my door. ‘Get out from behind there!’ Her voice was icy. ‘You’ve been lazy again, you idiot girl. Can’t you ever do anything right?’ Freda’s mouth was set in a hard line and her eyes were slits of fury. Snatching the library book I’d been reading, she lunged at me, whacking me across the head with it.
‘I’m confiscating this, and maybe then you’ll learn.’
Somehow, with an unerring instinct, Freda knew that this would be the worst punishment of all. In taking my book, she took away my one source of escape.
I lay on my bed dry eyed. I could almost feel myself pushing down the emotion I felt and locking it away in a cold, secret box in my chest. However beaten or bullied I was, however great the injustice done to me, I could never speak up to defend myself and I’d never learned to cry. I discovered from the moment I was born that tears would never bring comfort or caresses, only harsh words. And now here I was, seven years old and never daring to speak in case I got hit across the mouth for it.
I lay there in the dusk, watching the gas lamp’s greenish glow cast strange shadows on my wall and feeling the cold box in my chest weighing me down, a huge, hard lump that could never be eased by tears.
My father would get up after I’d left for school in the morning, have his breakfast and leave for work. He had a job as a fitter and turner at a company called Three Six Five. He was a vain man, obsessed with maintaining the new veneer of respectability he and Freda had created, and didn’t want to be seen coming home in his overalls like the other blue-collar workers. He hated the idea of our neighbours knowing he was a fitter, so he changed into his normal clothes at work before coming home.
One of the things my father obsessed about was having a perfectly polished doorstep. Freda had shown me how to use the donkey stone she’d got in exchange for rags from the rag-and-bone man. It was made of crushed stone, bleach, and cement and was used by all the housewives in our street to scour and colour their doorsteps. ‘Doing the step’ was another of my daily chores.
First,